Islam in an Era of Nation-States: Politics and Religious Renewal in Muslim Southeast Asia

Chapter 6 The Ahmadiyya Movement in Simunul: Islamic Reform in One Remote and Unlikely Place

Chapter 6 The Ahmadiyya Movement in Simunul ISLAMIC REFORM IN ONE REMOTE AND UNLIKELY PLACE Patricia Horvatich A century ago, Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje, a student of Islam, warned his colleagues in the Netherlands East Indies Civil Service that Islam in Indonesia, “which seemed so static, so sunk in a torpid medievalism , was actually changing in fundamental ways, but these changes were so gradual, so subtle, so concentrated in remote, and, to non-Islamic minds, unlikely places that although they take place before our very eyes, they are hidden from those who do not make a careful study of the subject” (Snouck Hurgronje 1906, 280 as quoted in Geertz 1963, 16). Islam is changing in Southeast Asia. Indeed, events associated with Islamic reform in Southeast Asia have been hard to miss. Unlike the subtle and gradual changes Snouck Hurgronje observed in the nineteenth century, major changes associated with Islamic reform have been very public, occasionally violent, and sudden . Although scholars recognize that Islam is changing in Southeast Asia, few have attended to Snouck Hurgronje’s observation that Islamic change is occurring in remote and unlikely places. The focus of most scholars has rarely strayed to rural areas. Studies such as those by Alfian (1989), Howard Federspiel (1970), Judith Nagata (1984), Mitsuo Nakamura (1984), and James Peacock (1978) have concentrated on regional centers such as Yogyakarta , Padang, Bandung, and Kuala Lumpur, where the major movements of Islamic reform have been organized. As I will show in this chapter, and as Michael Peletz and Martin Rössler demonstrate in theirs, Islamic reform is not exclusively an urban phenomenon. Indeed, as Peletz argues, processes and effects of Islamic reform in rural areas among ordinary Muslims merit far more attention from scholars than they have received in the past. Such attention to Islamic 184 | Patricia Horvatich reform in “remote” and “unlikely” places challenges widely accepted conclusions that modernism is a movement of urban intellectuals and that villagers are in no danger of losing their faith because their spiritual life is cared for by the imam of the local mosque (see Gibb 1947, 69). To assume that modernism is an urban movement of intellectuals or to claim as Ernest Gellner does that “Sufism is the opium of the tribesmen, reformism of the townsmen” (1981, 160) is to perceive villages as closed communities. Rural villages in Southeast Asia are not encapsulated enclaves of tradition . Not only are most villages in Southeast Asia incorporated within the world market, they are also very much involved in an international exchange of ideas. To a great degree, this exchange has been made possible by public mass education. This chapter will show that mass education in the Philippines is shaping modern discourses of Islamic reform by prompting college-educated Sama to criticize traditional practitioners of Islam. Specifically, I examine the ways the Ahmadiyya movement, an international movement of Islamic reform, was introduced to the people of a rural Philippine community. I explore the reasons some individuals in Simunul, Tawi-Tawi, find truth in Ahmadi teachings, while others reject them as heretical. I also examine the ways people have come to interpret the teachings of the Ahmadi and what the term ahmadi has come to mean to them. As Sama of Simunul Island appropriate new terms and concepts, they give them new meanings, thus changing standard interpretations of Ahmadi teachings. In such a way Islamic reform has come about in this small island community in the Sulu Archipelago. Like other authors in this volume, I examine the process of Islamic reform with attention to ways individuals strategize to effect and resist change in their communities. I focus on the beliefs and actions of “ordinary ” Muslims: not intellectuals, politicians, or religious leaders, but residents of a rural Philippine community. I pay particular attention to the college-educated members of this community, because it is these individuals who advocate the need to reform Islam. Following Dale Eickelman (1992) and Barbara Metcalf (this volume), I argue that there is a significant relation between mass education and Islamic reform by showing that mass education has prepared the ground for the development of alternative Islamic discourses and activism in Simunul, Tawi-Tawi. The Sama of Simunul Island Tawi-Tawi lies in the southwesternmost corner of the Philippines, only miles from Sabah, Malaysia. Over three hundred islands are located in this province, most of them small and uninhabited. The island of Tawi-Tawi is The Ahmadiyya Movement...